Mental health cuts put strain on police and ambos

Farrah Tomazin

MENTAL health services are being cut around the state, placing a significant strain on police and paramedics.

As state and federal governments continue to fight over health funding, some hospitals have been forced to close acute beds, reduce crisis services or reorganise staff to cope with budget changes.

Bendigo Health has cut out-of-hours, on-call services in Castlemaine, Echuca, Maryborough and Kyneton. This means that patients in those areas would have to be transported to Bendigo for treatment - often by police and paramedics.

South West Healthcare also appears set to cut after-hours emergency services in Portland, Hamilton and Camperdown, requiring people to be assessed through a video link-up service or travel to Warrnambool to be treated.

In Melbourne, St Vincent's has closed five acute beds, while Eastern Health has closed five beds at Upton House and removed evening shifts for its crisis assessment and treatment teams.

Community Services Minister Mary Wooldridge's spokesman blamed the changes on the federal government's decision to retrospectively slice $107 million from the health budget, and said the minister was disappointed her federal counterpart, Mark Butler, had not sought ''to intervene on behalf of Victorians with a mental illness''.

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But Labor parliamentary secretary Wade Noonan accused Ms Wooldridge of allowing mental health services ''to be cut at a time when demand pressures have never been greater''.

Ambulance union boss Steve McGhie said the system was already stretched and would struggle to cope.

''Some of the cases that could have been dealt with by on-call services will end up tying up an ambulance for many hours, and may even tie up police for many hours because the patient may become aggressive and violent,'' he said.

Health and Community Services Union secretary Lloyd Williams agreed. He said crisis teams provided emergency intervention for people with a serious mental illness, ''but you cut those services and people have no other place to go other than to hospital, and hospital beds are already limited.

If people can't be admitted and are sent home, they will be put at risk,'' he said.

Police Association boss Greg Davies said police weren't properly trained to deal with mental health patients, but devoted a great deal of resources transporting them between hospitals under section 10 of the Mental Health Act. Under that act, police have the power to apprehend people for assessments where they constitute a risk of harm to themselves or others.

But as an Office of Police Integrity report released last year found, each of these call-outs took at least one officer off the beat for an average of two hours.

In Victoria, the high reliance on police meant only 10 per cent of patient transportations were done by ambulance. In New South Wales, that figure is around 90 per cent.

Victoria Police assistant commissioner Andrew Crisp said there was ''no denying'' police used significant resources to assist mentally ill patients. But a pilot program, in which police and clinicians work together to assess patients, had reduced the burden - as well as the number of patients transported to hospital, he said. ''It's about [thinking] creatively about what we can do to maximise our resources, while at the same time contribute to a better level of care.''